*1 It was of course the disruption, and not the hurt, that (feebly) agitated Philip Larkin. ‘Sorry to hear about your misfortunes. To me the loss of a loved one (in this sense) would be nothing at all compared to the consequent throes of MOVING – I think I hate moving almost more than anything. Are you really going to have to do all that?’ So Phoebe was right. ‘He’s never going to move to London, he’s never going to move out of Hell. He couldn’t. He couldn’t move next door.’
*2 And this half-conscious retaliatory flail cost me far more than it cost Jane Howard. It postponed my engorged encounter with her five-volume magnum opus, the Cazalet Chronicles. And it deprived Jane of the many hours of detailed praise I would’ve given it, face to face (and she needed detailed praise, in life and in art). To hear that would have pleased her, and to voice it would have pleased me. Of course, it’s too late now. She no longer needs that praise. Nevertheless, the omission, and all the attendant regret, is lastingly mine.
Chapter 4 Beelzebub
Xalapa
As for how Christopher might be amusing himself otherwise, if he hadn’t been pushed to the side of his own life, the subject never came up. It never came up because it so obviously groaned with frustration and futility. But there was this one time, in Texas in the fall of October 2011, brought about by happenstance…
It was then seventeen months since onset and a full year since he published his first report from the land of the stricken (it would become Chapter 1 of Mortality), where he wrote, ‘I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it.’*1 What he was most immediately looking forward to, Blue told me, was a leisurely circuit of various universities with their daughter Antonia, who was then seventeen, and by October 2011 that window had closed.
The missed opportunity I was about to present him with was in comparison vanishingly slight. But minor wounds, too, can hurt and connect (‘once one has got used to the big wrongs of life,’ wrote V. S. Pritchett, ‘little ones wake up, with their mean little teeth’). We were in the Zilkhas’ garden, among its statues and butterflies, and I said as casually as I could,
‘When I leave tomorrow I’ll be heading south. Over the Rio Grande.’
‘Oh? To what end?’
‘Just a festival. By air to Veracruz, then by road to Xalapa.’
And it struck me: I couldn’t think of an adventure he would find more powerfully enticing. The late flight out of Houston, the midnight landing in violent Veracruz, the drive to the complimentary hotel, the international cast of thinkers and drinkers, the fresh audiences of upturned faces – in Mexico, with its voluptuous flora, its tangily effectual margaritas and mojitos, its scorching spices, land of revolution and of knifepoint anti-clericalism, land of the implacable rebel, of Álvaro Obregón, of Pancho Villa, of Emiliano Zapata…
‘Sorry, Hitch.’
‘What for?’ he said without any sign of disappointment in his open face. ‘Someone’s got to do it. They did ask me, if I remember.’
‘Of course they asked you. I saw your picture in one of the programmes.’ Instead of going to Mexico, Christopher would be going to MD Anderson, most days – for monitoring and therapy. I thought of the past summer, when he returned to Washington and a) waited out a throat-to-navel radiation rash (caused by thirty-five days under the synchrotron),*2 and b) was admitted to a DC hospital which gave him ‘a vicious staph pneumonia (and sent [him] home twice with it)’; during that time – certainly, confessedly – he came very close to despair and to surrender; but then there were ‘intervals of relative robustness’ marked by nothing much worse than ‘annihilating fatigue’. I now said, ‘But I’m changing my ticket. I’m coming straight back here. By the weekend, Hitch, I’ll once again be in your arms.’
On Tuesday evening as I climbed into the yellow cab (Michael Z was unaccountably elsewhere), Christopher came to see me off, out on the driveway, in shirtsleeves, cheerfully and lovingly…And then the flight south through the darkness, and the long bus ride to Xalapa with a score of other attendees, and the meal break en route at a roadside bodega, where I had a stimulating talk with the historian Niall Ferguson (husband of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on whom the Hitch had long had a crush). He, Christopher, might’ve had all this happen to him too, together with me, in the alternate world of health.
—————
‘I didn’t want to be discouraging, but now you’re back safe and sound, Little Keith, I can tell you a very crunchy story about Mexico City. It’s a good one.’
‘Please.’
Out of hospital for a while, Christopher, by now very much used to being in and out of hospital, was in hospital. Up in the Tower and in his own room – the scattered notebooks and typescripts, the beeping monitors, the high bed standing to attention.
‘A Nordic theologian,’ said Christopher, ‘a gentleman and a scholar, landed at the airport and took a taxi to his hotel. Before he could get inside he was snatched and bundled into a car. They had him humped over on his knees in the back and they kept jabbing his arse with their awls and skewers – as he told them all his passwords and
